


A Little Unsteady

by ThisIsntFunnyDean



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Climbing Class, Depression, Domestication, Fluff, Healing, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Panic Attacks, Rebuilding, Scars, Singing, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 19:38:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4889566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisIsntFunnyDean/pseuds/ThisIsntFunnyDean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghosts of his transformation left guilt tight around his heart.  What does it mean to recover?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Unsteady

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is always greatly appreciated, but in no way obligatory. Thank you for reading!

The mines were just as cold as he’d remembered them.  Frozen still with the night of misgivings, stained with arcs he knew came from his hand.  Beams from flashlights brought forward scenes he’d hoped were an influence of a transforming mind, but knew they were simply memories. The nothing-but-business talk of those swarming around him deadened what respect his guilt-sorry psyche could feel, and he knew nothing scribbled on an official notepad could explain what he'd done.  He was shivering, the quake riddling his arms not entirely from the winter, standing alone fenced by yellow tape.  Chalk lines.  Numbered cards in front of flashing cameras. 

Underneath his scarf, his concealed, mutated mouth still tasted like rust, invading his nose, overpowering the rotten smell they’d walked in to.  If opening his mouth wouldn’t tear apart his seams, he would be screaming.  Keeping them in only shook him more.  He stuffed his hands in his pockets to hold himself together.

Over there was a head.  Of a perfect stranger.  And if anyone cared to, tests would prove the marks in it matched his teeth.  But everyone already knew they would.  Damned if he knew where its body was.  Damned if he didn’t.

Nothing, not the scarf wrapped around his face, the shaking in his body, or empty eye sockets sending him to Hell, damned him more than the echoes he remembered his animalistic scream sent down the shafts, the ones reprised with radio static and every camera flash.

A hand coaxed one of his own out of his pockets, and he didn’t have to see to whom it belonged.  Chris wove their fingers together and Josh held on.  A camera flashed the edges of an inky pool. 

 

\---

 

Teeth don’t regress into gums.  An adult can’t absorb his new teeth when he no longer needs them.  Extractions require surgery.  Surgery requires waiting rooms, with shopping networks on TVs and women holding their bags tight to their sides when a man hiding his face walks past.  Machines beeped, women with shrill voices gave fake smiles over phone calls, men in dress pants tapped impatient shoes on the linoleum.  And Josh made himself as little as possible in the back of the waiting room.  Waiting for Chris to return. 

He watched the man walk with a purpose to the receptionist and gesture his thumb over his shoulder.  Like a piece of twine stretching tighter and tighter, each step Chris took stole bits and pieces of his resolve till he felt his skin stretching over his bones.  A woman sitting a handful of seats away stole glances at the man covered from head to foot, but Josh only kept his eyes forward.  A few nods between the two at the counter, and each second back let Josh breathe deeper till he felt lightheaded with air.  Chris sat at his side with clipboard in hand.  The woman went back to her article.

“Back of the room.  Kind of full circle, eh?”  He smiled down at the clipboard.  “Think you can do it?”  Chris offered the ballpoint up, meeting Josh’s eyes.  Eyes too kind to let himself look into.  He looked back at the pen.  Nodded his head.

Inside, in a heated building, and his hand was as shaken as before.  He pressed the tip down, where the box told him _Name_ , and put whatever he had at the moment into writing at least four letters.  _Washington_ was infinitely longer, but he did it.  He slid down the page to _Address._

“Do you remember our address?”

_No._   He shook his head, stared at the tip of the pen where it met the paper. 

Chris recited the street, numbers and all, pausing when Josh needed a bit to calm his hand, starting back up with patience unmatched.  He was crossing the final _t_ when his fingers convulsed and the pen snapped out of his grip, clattering like an explosion on the floor, skittering under a row of seats.  The woman dropped the magazine a fraction and stared at the pen, at the pair.  Chris squeezed Josh’s knee when he stood to pick up the pen.  Josh’s frantic eyes stayed on his back, wide and panicked.  The woman’s stayed on Josh. 

When he sat back down, Chris slid the clipboard from Josh’s hand, which had taken on a grip that reddened his fingers.  His voice was a balm to Josh’s ears.

“I’ll get the rest, Josh.  Don’t worry about a thing.”

Josh let his heavy head finally rest on Chris’s shoulder, taking in the noises of his writing like a song, his warmth like he was starved for it.  And when the woman crunched her magazine close to her chest and moved to the front of the room, Josh pretended he didn’t notice.  He gripped Chris’s sleeve tight, not at all ready for what was waiting for him in the surgeon's chair.

 

\---

 

Weeks later, stitches have healed, bandages removed. His family portrait was now ash flittering somewhere around a mountain, but he still remembered what his smile looked like.  Ancestry had given him golden skin, and braces – perfect teeth.  The two together were screen worthy, which was where he’d wanted them.  Not so much, now.

Chris made sounds in the kitchen while he himself stood in front of a standalone mirror.  Their bedroom was cool with the air coming through the open window, rustling the curtains, blowing his grown out hair.  The color had come back to his eyes, the blanched irises traded for the green he expected to see staring back.  His new teeth changed only a little of the picture.  They were made from old dental records, of course, casted specifically for him.  The first time he’d put them in, he could even feel what had been a filling in his molar.  They still felt foreign, though, mouth constantly too full.

What plunged his head deeper was the gnarled scar leading from the side of his mouth to where his cheek bone lay.  A permanent brand committing him.  A scarlet letter of stretched skin he couldn’t always hide behind a scarf, or his hand.  A penance for the mayhem he’d taken a hand in, yet he still swam in guilt.  He deserved a hundred more scars.  He deserved to rot in those channels like the miners before him.

But there he was, looking back at an image of himself.  The outside was human, or returning to it.  His heart remembered when he was a monster. 

Soft notes reached Josh’s ears and he knew Chris was singing over the dishes and probably had his shirtsleeves soaked by now.  He didn’t deserve Chris, either.

He put his pointer finger to the spot his reflection showed his scar and traced it on the smooth surface, committing the shape to memory lest he forget what he’d earned.  And at all things, he got angry at music sung through the house, and planted a fist squarely where the glass showed his face.  The last glimpse he caught was his snarled face, which he thought was fitting.

Chris found him under a desk in the hollow where the chair belonged, knees to his chest, head hanging between.  The sobs were silent, as they always were, and his arms looked to be the only thing holding his pieces together.  Glass was scattered around the floor, surrounding the mirror where it was down on the floor, littering the cracks of broken books and dresser drawers toppled from their places.  Chris found the path Josh had made to the desk and stepped carefully to the opening.

He did the only thing that seemed to calm Josh in these moments: sing.  And even without any music, he put his voice in the air for Josh to breathe in and to be full of something else, something better, something more persuasive than what was in his head already.  They’d been there by now, and Josh hadn’t been allowed to shave his own face in since.

Chris navigated the glass without giving it anymore mind than it needed, and sat himself flush with Josh, feeling Josh’s ruined body like hands wringing the air from his lungs.  He sang on, hushed close to Josh’s ear, and after a few minutes took the even breaths as a good sign and rubbed the tempo of the song into Josh’s spine with a firm thumb. 

 

\---

 

The next morning Josh raised his eyes from sleep to a world just waking up, sheets and arms wrapped around his body till he couldn’t tell the difference between the two.  On the wall, the only object to survive his rage, hung a candid picture of his sisters tacked up with a pin.  They smiled at the camera in unison.  Josh remembered being the one behind the lens.  The colors were fading from sun exposure, looking waxed and worn, but he still recalled the joke they were laughing at.  A breeze through the window rustled it in its place, shifting the angle.

He sighed.  And behind him, so did Chris.  The bed bounced as he rolled onto his side and against Josh’s back, a heavy breath coming from him while his hand dug its way around to pull Josh closer to him.  Sometime in the night the covers always fell to the floor, but they always somehow managed to keep warm together. 

Chris put his head in its place on Josh’s shoulder, a sleep soaked mouth spilling, “Good morning.”

Josh closed his eyes, smiled, and there was his scar, taut and thick, but he let it happen.  “Definitely is.”


End file.
